


Posthomo Americanus Borea, or: I Have Seen the Shape of Things to Come, and It's Worse than You Think

by SMJB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Capitalism, Creepypasta, Existential Horror, Gen, History, Horror, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:14:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23098414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: The world is doomed--not by some Black Swan event but by the inevitable consequence of our own actions. If there's a way to stop it, I don't know what it is, and our only hope is a drunken time traveler who fucks with history just to see what he can get away with changing.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Posthomo Americanus Borea, or: I Have Seen the Shape of Things to Come, and It's Worse than You Think

_Time, which flies irresistibly and perpetually, sweeps up and carries away with it everything that has seen the light of day and plunges it into utter darkness, whether deeds of no significance or those that are mighty and worthy of commemoration..._

\--Anna Komnena, _The Alexiad._

~

“You’ve had enough, friend,” I said as the man waved me over for another drink.

Tim Walker--I knew the name only because I had carded him--had been having quite an eclectic set of drinks, beers and wines and hard liquors with no rhyme or reason beyond never ordering the same one twice. The particular abomination he had ordered prior to this had been one part vodka, one part scotch, and one part cherry Coke.

“Bah! Smallpox and the boubonic plague couldn’t kill me, and cirrhosis of the liver won’t either.”

“Statements like that aren’t going to convince me of your sobriety.”

“Your manager know you’re turning away business?”

“I’m the owner,” I said.

He deflated. “I’ll have a water, then.”

I gave him a water, and while I was dealing with another customer, he disappeared. Son of a bitch stole my glass, I thought. Ah, well; not worth getting worked up about. Customers broke or walked away with glasses all the time in bars.

It must have been an hour later, nearing closing time, that Tim Walker reappeared. The bar was quiet now, and how he had managed this without me hearing him was beyond me. He had the glass of water, full of unmelted ice.

“How’d you get there?” I asked.

“I never left.” He held up his glass. “See?”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to be proof of,” I said.

“Of course not. Nothing I do matters,” he said hollowly, staring off into the middle distance. “The annoying thing is that I can change things, do change things, and things are different for a while, but sooner or later it all falls back into place. It’d be one thing if fate were immutable or something, but it’s not quite like that. It’s like nothing I do, no matter how big, lasts. The ripples just fade away eventually.”

I nod, having heard variations on this story many times before. Then things take a left turn.

“Like, okay, so I arranged the assassination of Julius Caesar, right? But then Mark Antony takes his place! So I have him killed, and then some other boy toy of Cleopatra’s steps up. At this point I realize there’s a common denominator here and take her out. Well guess what? That worked. I saved the Roman Republic...for a couple of decades, before Augustus finishes what Julius started and then history is right back on track.”

“Are you claiming to be immortal?” I asked.

“No, of course not. I’m a time traveler.”

“It really is time that you went home,” I said.

“I can prove it.”

“Yeah?”

“You got a gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Grab it,” he said. “We’re going to need it where we’re going.”

Humoring him in hopes of getting him out the door, I grabbed the rifle I keep behind the bar.

“Good.” He stood, and then the whole room shifted and was gone.

We were in a forest, and it was day. “Where the fuck are we?” I demanded.

“Still in your bar, only about ten million years in the future,” he said. “Keep your wits about you, because there are things in this forest that are just as smart as we are but not as nice.” He then pulled a handgun out of a lower back holster under his jacket.”

He began walking. I followed. “Why did you bring me here?” I demanded.

“Ask me again when we return.”

“How are you able to do this?”

“Dunno; I just...do it. It’s an ability I’ve had since my teens. I also never get sick.”

“Wait. Do _I_ have to worry about getting sick?”

“Not here. I mean, the local ape species has diseases you can presumably catch, but there aren’t any plagues here. Plagues burn through hosts at a very high rate, the kind of rate that you can only sustain if you’ve got a civilization and millions of people around you, and, well…” he gestured at the forest around us.

“Speaking of which, you said this was the future. Are we in a nature preserve or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“When we’ve found what we’re looking for.”

“What are we looking for?”

“You’ll see.”

He wouldn’t elaborate, so I changed the subject. “So, Cleopatra…”

He sighed. “No, she’s not hot. The Ptolemys were nearly as incestuous as the Habsbergs; she looked like a potato and was _lucky_ to look like a potato. The reason she was able to seduce the most powerful men in the world to her side and often into her bed was that she was the ancient world’s answer to Napoleon.”

“I take it you get that a lot,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about history.”

“Why don’t you write a book or something, then?”

“To what end?” he asked.

“Idunno. Posterity?”

He snorted and gestured around. “Here’s your ‘posterity,’” he said.

“I take it this is not a park.”

“No. The whole world is like this. Well I mean, there are also deserts and grasslands and stuff, but you know what I mean.”

“So what happened to humanity?” I asked.

“Shit--I didn’t think this one through. Stupid drunk brain,” he said.

“Didn’t think what through?”

“We need to draw the thing hunting us into the open, but it’s not going to attack while it’s outnumbered. Shit, I need a plan.”

“I’ve got a plan,” I said, and immediately started backtracking. I’d spent years hunting and tracking animals in northern Michigan with my dad and if some _thing_ was going to hunt _me_ I was going to show it who the top of the food chain was. If there truly had been no humans here for a million years, then this critter was going to learn what it meant to face off against the greatest predator to have ever lived.

As I backtracked, I scanned for footprints. I heard rustling-- _got you, you son of a bitch!_ \--and raised my rifle to fire. And paused. _That’s a person!_ A naked man was running towards me with a club held high over his head. The instant after that it registered that person or no, this was still a threat and I needed to deal with this, but still I choked; I had never before fired a gun at a human being in anger, and I suppose I just didn’t have it in me to do so. My assailant was on me before I could decide on a course of action, and I used my rifle to perry the club blow as I got tackled to the ground.

There was too much adrenaline in my system for me to remember what happened next with perfect clarity. There was a flurry of blows. My assailant punched and scratched--no joking thing, with those talons he had instead of fingernails. On paper, I had every advantage in the world--I was taller than him, stronger than him, and had years of martial arts training--but I’d broken up enough bar fights to know that that wasn’t always enough; there was an advantage in meanness, in being the person who didn’t pull your punches when the other person did, and as I think I’ve demonstrated, _that_ advantage was _not_ on my side. I remember him scowling at me at some point, showing off catlike fangs, and an utter lack of anything human behind the eyes that glared at me.

Then Tim Walker came up behind it and bashed its head in with a rock.

“So yeah, this is what we came to see. You alright?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said, checking the various gashes I’d gotten in the fight. “You said there weren’t any people here!”

“And there aren’t,” he said.

“There are certain anatomical differences--” on top of the ones I mentioned, my assailant had no nipples “--but that thing was clearly human.”

“The local ape species--which I call _Posthomo americanus borea_ , the northern American post-human, when I'm feeling pretentious-- _does_ closely resemble the ancestral state in its adult form, doesn’t it? Fascinating genus, really. The nymphs are three inches long at birth and look like a tailless tarsier, at which point they must quickly escape from the nest to avoid being eaten by their mother. They stay nearby, though, in order to observe how she survives, but they also grow rapidly--the only thing I’ve seen like it is sauropod growth--and so quickly become worthwhile targets for the mother. It’s a delicate balancing act for them, for the more they learn the better off they’ll be when they morph into adults, but the longer they stay, the more likely they’ll be to be eaten. Nymphs are also largely herbivorous while adults are largely carnivorous, a niche partitioning that’ll only grow over time, though there will eventually be species that do it the other way around. A remarkable evolutionary change, but when the world’s most specialized K-strategist evolves into the most r-strategist mammal to have ever existed, something extreme has got to happen to allow for that.”

I vaguely remembered that K/r strategist were terms in biology, extreme ends of the spectrum of childcare; K strategists have few children and spend a lot of resources in ensuring that they grow up healthy and strong, while r strategists just spawn out a million eggs and hope. I was also horrified by this tale of parental cannibalism.

“This species is still highly intelligent--I suspect that if you dropped this creature into your time, it would be able to learn to speak and not be too academically impaired--but that won’t last long; the fact is that without the ability to form social groups and with lifespans that rarely exceed sixteen years, intelligence is a waste of resources.

“It’s really quite a fascinating genus, if you manage to ignore the fact that that these are our descendents.”

I latched onto that _sixteen years_. “How old is this one?” I demanded.

“Looks to have been in the prime of its life; nine, ten I’d say.”

“Oh, God!” I cried.

“Oh, relax--it _is. not. human._ Everything that makes us human was bred out of its ancestors long before they became physically distinguishable from _Homo sapeins_.”

“How did this happen?” I asked. “Like, genetic engineering gone wrong or something?”

Tim Walker paused. “No,” he said. “Not as such, at least. Genetic engineering just made adapting to the end of civilization easier.”

“Then...how?”

He looked like he was considering his words. “You’re a business owner, yes?”

“Yes?” I said, confused.

“Would you say you’re a good one or a bad one?”

“I mean, sales are good, my customers are happy, my workers are happy….”

“So why aren’t you rich?” he asked.

“Well, it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness to get ahead in this business. You’ve got to be willing to pay people less than they’re worth and never hire enough of them, to not care about your customers killing themselves with alcohol poisoning so long as you squeeze every last dollar out of them that you can, to be cheap with suppliers. I guess I just like people too much,” I said.

He nodded. “I figured it was something like that. What if I told you that that was true of every kind of business? Would that seem plausible to you?”

“I mean, sure,” I said.

“Now remember that natural selection is a thing,” he said. “Imagine centuries--millennia, even--of people breeding for...well, sociopathy. For the ability to say ‘fuck you, got mine.’”

“But--it’s not like rich people are the only ones breeding,” I protested.

He shrugged. “Perhaps not, but consider: how likely is it that Jeff Bezos will die in a mugging? When oil pipelines break, they don’t poison rich people’s drinking water. Three bad months at the bar could see you out on the street; Bezos wouldn’t even notice three bad months at Amazon. Can you imagine someone like him dying of stress? Of bad nutrition? The more money you have, the more protected you are from the vulgarities of chance; the less, the less. These are the subtle yet direct consequences that allow natural selection to do its thing, and thus the current trajectory of the species is towards sociopathy--towards this.” He gestured around at the forest.

“Sociopathy led to the end of civilization?” I asked.

“How could it not?” he said. “Imagine a world without love or altruism, where the sole basis of all human interaction is greed. Where everyone would stab anyone in the back given the least incentive. How long can you imagine such a society surviving?

“Not as long as it did, I’d wager, and frankly the only reason it did survive for any amount of time was that they had robots for the raising of their kids and the growing of their food and suchlike. As those broke down, this thing’s ancestors had to adapt more and more to life in the wilderness, and having lost every human bonding instinct, well...”

“So what’s the solution? Communism?”

“Optimist,” he snorted. “Oh, capitalism certainly didn’t _help_ anything when it made a virtue of what was once a dirty little secret, but the root of the problem is more basic than an economic system Adam Smith dreamed up two and a half centuries ago. The problem is hierarchy--hierarchies of all descriptions inevitably become dominated by people who use their positions to maintain and grow their power, for the simple reason that people who don’t do that don’t stay in power. Natural selection, again. Making the Soviet Union win the Cold War instead of the United States isn’t going to change jack shit, unless perhaps the Soviets are changed beyond all recognition beforehand.

“That’s the rub of it, you see; _I don’t know how to fix this,_ ” he gestured at the dead post-human. “The rot that caused him to exist goes back to the dawn of agriculture.”

He looked away. “It started far more peacefully than theorists realize, you know. Hierarchy, I mean. In the band, the best spear maker makes gifts of spears for all their friends, and in return gets gifts of meat. You can just make your own spear, but it’s not going to be as good as the spears the best spear maker makes--like, by definition--and quite frankly it’s not good for the group that you don’t have the best spear you can have. But you make a spear and it lasts for years; you hunt an animal, you eat the meat, and you have to go hunting again. These jobs are not equal in their impact, and thus their prestige, and yet not everyone can dedicate their lives to the art of spear making; if no one gathers the food, everyone starves.

“Now make the group bigger, and you have to keep better track of everything because not everyone is your friend. Suddenly you have to remember far more debts in more modular detail than you used to. The more complicated the system becomes, the more the ability to keep track of everything becomes a necessary skill and the more doing so becomes a full time job, and pretty soon it just makes sense to have someone whose job it is to tell everyone else what to do. And here’s the kicker--these proto-kings were hired to do the job. The people would be like, ‘Hey, you’re good at math and knowing what needs to be done and when--wanna come coordinate for us?’

“But even though the first people with this job got it out of merit, take a wild guess as to which people made the decisions about who should succeed the people who made the decisions. Did you guess the people who made the decisions? Correct! A rookie mistake, really, but people were new to this whole civilization thing back then. And to be fair it wasn’t institutionalized that way, it’s just...when the guy whose job is to know who’s good at what job tells you who he thinks would be good for his job, that opinion has weight. Of course they picked their friends and children, though, and a few generations of slowly-growing corruption later people had forgotten that there had ever been a time before kings.

“No thugs stealing people’s shit at spearpoint required; such people have always existed, of course, but so have ways of dealing with them, so the theorists really need to stop riding Hobbes’ dick so hard.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

“Well, enough of this maudlin bullshit,” he said. The world shifted again, and we were on the street in the cold a block away from my bar.

We headed back.

“So what do you plan to do next?” I asked.

“Idunno. I’ve been toying with the idea of making the Slavs adopt Islam instead of Eastern Orthodoxy, just to see how far the ripples of that change get before getting smoothed out by the ebon sea of time.”

“I see,” I said. We reached the bar and went inside. “Why did you show me all this?”

“I suppose I needed to unload. For someone to know what I’m fighting and why,” Tim said, walking back to his seat at the bar. “Mostly, though, I need you to understand why I need _another freaking drink._ ”


End file.
